What is the budget of an advertising campaign in Yandexdirect and how to calculate it. How much: minimum budget for Yandex.Direct How to double your advertising budget in Yandex Direct

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Unlike most other channels (television, newspapers, magazines), in Yandex.Direct the budget is not fixed, it can be managed, it can be changed and adjusted during the campaign.

Estimating the budget of an advertising campaign in Direct

That is, if the cost of an advertising block in a magazine is 1,500 rubles per ad, then you will pay that much, regardless of the text of the ad, the presence of competitors and other factors. In Yandex.Direct, the situation is different - in this system you pay for clicks on your ad, that is, for clicks, but how many clicks there will be and what the price for each click will be is difficult to predict.

On the one hand, this approach is convenient - by changing the rate per click, you can reduce or increase advertising costs at any time. However, it is difficult to determine how much money you will need with this approach. For example, you want to save money and reduce the cost per click. At the same time, you automatically give way to your competitors who are willing to pay more per click. Or, on the contrary, you set a high cost per click, but your ad turns out to be extremely attractive, and as a result you pay more because it is ahead of the competition without additional costs.

To help advertisers resolve this issue, Yandex has introduced an advertising budget forecaster. This is a tool that allows you to understand how much money you should spend on a campaign. The forecast algorithm makes calculations based on data collected by the system over the last 30 days, so you will get different results at different times.

How does advertising budget forecast work?

Your first step in forecasting advertising costs will be to log into Yandex.Direct, where you will find the “Budget Forecast” option:

By clicking on the budget forecast, you will be taken to the page for estimating the budget of the advertising campaign, where you will have to enter the name of the region in which your potential customers live, the period during which you plan to display the ad and a list of key phrases.

Keywords are the words that a user types into the search bar when searching for your product. If you are selling jewelry, then this could be “buy a gold ring”, “cheap gold ring”, etc.

If you wish, you can change the display period; to do this, just click on the word “change”:

After this, a window will appear in which you can select the period, sites and currency in which you pay for advertising.

Display regions and keywords should be selected in advance - searching and selecting keywords takes a lot of time. After entering the necessary data, all you have to do is click the “Calculate” button and get the approximate amount of costs.

Specifics of the resulting forecast

Keep in mind that the amount you receive as a result of the forecast is not the final result, but only a guideline. There are several reasons for this:

  • Seasonality of search queries. Considering that the forecast is based on information for the last 30 days, seasonality is a serious distorting factor.
  • When making forecasts, average campaign performance figures are taken. Because some advertisers run successful campaigns and some do not, the average is not particularly accurate.
  • The advertising budget forecast does not take into account impressions through the Yandex advertising network (YAN).

Taking into account all of the above, it is not worth spending effort and money on eliminating errors and obtaining an ideal forecast. It is better to take its result into account as a guideline and clarify everything in practice by conducting a little testing. If you keep this in mind, forecasting the budget for an advertising campaign in Yandex will become a useful and effective tool.

Media planning is an extremely important process not only within the framework of million-dollar budgets. This procedure is no less important for small advertisers. Of course, offline it’s a little easier to predict future promotion costs. Here it is easy to understand how much it will cost to print business cards, place them on a billboard, or publish materials in the thematic press. However, with the right approach, you can create a media plan and calculate the budget in Yandex.Direct.

If you, like me, regularly work with contextual advertising services, then you have undoubtedly come across the Yandex tool “Budget Forecast”. This thing is very useful, but you need to know how to use it. The main page of the service looks like this.

Important indicators

For example, for branding campaigns, the required parameter will be the forecast of the number of impressions. The system analyzes data collected by robots of the “Word Selection” tool over the last 28 days. Yandex then, based on this information, predicts how many times a certain key query will be shown to the target audience. The predictor calculates transitions and CTR in a very average way, based on the volume of traffic selected during the calculation.

As for the written off cost of a click, this indicator is not fixed at all. As you know, placement follows the principle of an auction, so an approximate CPC is issued at the moment at which the preliminary forecast was made. You should not rely entirely on the resulting transition cost, since it only helps to estimate the budget for Direct.

Budget Forecast Tool

As an example that will help us figure out today how to calculate the budget for an advertising campaign in Yandex.Direct, let’s take the fictional store of goods for newborns karapuzik.rf. This online store is open in Podolsk, and delivery of goods is carried out throughout Moscow and the Moscow region. Now we can turn to the Budget Forecast tool.

First, the service offers to decide on the region of display. By default, the whole world is used, but we need to select only the desired regions. Click “Specify”, then using the “Quick selection” option on the right side of the window that opens, click on “Moscow and region”.

The next stage is the calculation parameters. Initially, the system gives a forecast in rubles for the month. The result is an optimal media plan. However, you can adjust your settings to forecast for the week, year, or quarter, change the currency, or see how much it will cost to run on mobile devices only.

The third step is key phrases. Advertising will be displayed based on this list; it forms the planned budget for the advertising campaign in Direct.

Since at the preliminary calculation stage there is no actual launch of an advertising campaign, there is no need to compile the most detailed list of queries, consisting of hundreds or even thousands of keywords. The screenshot above shows that at one time it is possible to calculate only such a list, which is composed of a maximum of 4096 characters. In addition, here it is necessary to take into account two important nuances:

  • It is not recommended to limit your list to a small number of high-frequency queries. This is exactly how forecasts with a planned budget of tens of millions often arise;
  • It is not recommended to uncheck the “automatically adjust phrases with negative keywords” checkbox. The fact is that for the system there is no difference between the high-frequency driver and all the queries embedded in it. For example, if our store karapuzik.rf is promoted using the phrases “baby strollers” and “baby strollers,” then “Budget Forecast” will add up the traffic of both phrases.

In fact, this will be an error, since the second request is an investment in the first, namely, in the first, the number of all requests that are formed by the words “baby” and “strollers” is already taken into account. Thus, the cross-backing track we talked about is an extremely important process even at the budget planning stage.

In order to calculate the advertising budget on Yandex.Direct as correctly as possible, you need to pay special attention to the selection of key phrases and their pre-processing. We need to collect a list that will contain queries with high and medium frequency. Next you will need to cross-mix them, for example like this.

Let's look at the example of forecasting impressions for the key phrase “baby strollers” before cross-negative keywords and after the necessary negative keywords are added to it. The difference is obvious.

Thus, on just one keyword, if the calculation is incorrect, we can make a mistake of about 23,909 impressions, and the difference in the budget will be more than 70 percent!

But how can you make a budget forecast for Yandex.Direct so that it matches reality as closely as possible? To do this, we open a table in Excel, and then collect there those words and phrases that, in our opinion, representatives of the target audience will enter most often.

It is advisable to enter each keyword into its table on a new line in order to quickly load and calculate the entire list of words in the future. It is not necessary to separate some phrases from others with commas: the system will be able to do this itself automatically.

Next, transfer the resulting list to the “Budget Forecast”, in the “Select Key Phrases” box. That being said, the Suggestions tool is a great tool for creating a more detailed list. Here you can get inspired by unconsidered ideas or immediately add suitable queries to the list:

Click “Calculate” and see a preliminary forecast of traffic and budget in your own words. Here we should pay attention to two additional options - the “Refine” and “Select” buttons. They are located next to each key phrase. Seeing the real frequency of keywords using the “Refine” button, we can either clarify them with additional negative keywords through the “Edit” button,

or find more relevant and less frequent queries using the “Select” tool.

At the same time, I always put all phrases whose frequency in their original form is off the charts in quotation marks before calculating the Direct advertising budget. Compare for yourself: the request “buy a stroller” without quotes and with quotes.

And if we compare the initial list and the budget forecast for it without taking into account geotargeting, cross-negative keywords, irrelevant negative keywords, special operators, we will see that the difference in money can differ by about 2.5 times, and in the number of possible impressions - even more than 4.5 times!


But even this forecast can be significantly improved and optimized in reality. Let's talk in more detail about how to calculate the budget for contextual advertising better than in the Yandex forecast.

Average projected rate

The target CPC for each keyword is too high in most cases. The fact is that the average rate given by the system is calculated at the moment when the user clicks the “Calculate” button. It shows the average value between those advertisers who bought 100% of the traffic volume.

In reality, the cost of a click can differ between the forecast and the fact by even 5, and sometimes 7 times. This indicator in an active advertising campaign will be influenced by many parameters, for example:

  • actual statistics accumulated in the account;
  • period of the advertising campaign;
  • account quality indicators;
  • quality of the keyword and so on.

Therefore, if the question arises of how to calculate the budget for contextual advertising, it is best to go to Yandex.Direct, create a test campaign with text and image ads, and then generate a test group of ads with your keywords.

This trick will help you calculate a real reduction factor to divide your initial media plan into numbers that are close to reality. For example, if the bet in your account differs from the forecast by 1.5 times, then we will divide all the parameters proposed by the tool by one and a half times.

Today I will share step-by-step instructions on how to make a budget forecast in Yandex Direct using Direct Commander. I discovered this method from the guys from the ConvertMonster blog (for which I thank them very much) when I was looking for a way to receive more or less adequate expectations from Direct.

Don't forget to indicate the region in the forecast from Yandex.

So, if you did everything correctly, you will have a budget forecast from Yandex Direct on your computer. But here we are only interested in the predicted CTR by position. This is what it looks like for me:


As you can see, here I went too far and took a couple of very low-frequency keywords. You don't need to do this for budget forecasting.

Pay attention to the projected budget - a little more than 1 million rubles for special placement and almost 50,000 rubles for guarantees. Dangerous! 🙂

Step 2 - Get the current bids from the auction

Now let’s get the real bids from the Direct auction so that the budget forecast doesn’t look so threatening. To do this, you will have to create an advertising campaign, upload it to your account, and only then increase the cost per click using a special tool in Direct Commander.


Quick campaign

To create a quick campaign, I use a special file with macros - my assistant in working with contextual advertising. Thanks for it Yuri Skachko.

We fill in the basic fields that are sufficient for loading and send the campaign to your account. I do this using Direct Commander:


Sending the campaign to your account

We place bets (any), set the desired region, and upload it to your account. Now comes the fun part.

To get current bids from the Yandex Direct auction, which are valid right now, select all ad groups and click the “Get bids, prices...” button, as in the screenshot below:


Click “Get Bets”

Today we will look at how, using the Yandex Direct budget forecast tool, we can predict expenses for contextual advertising and determine the result that we will get from using the system itself.

So, to get started, go to Yandex Direct home page and click on the big button “ Place an advertisment» (you must be logged in to Yandex in advance). There is a special link at the top “ Budget forecast«.

Click on it, after which a new tool opens “ ". I want to say right away that all data from this tool is for informational purposes only.

They do not talk about exact numbers, but they help to get some kind of budget forecast that you can focus on when planning and creating advertising campaigns in.

Selecting a region to display contextual advertising

So, first we need to select the region in which we plan to display. Press the button " Specify» (1) and how in the keyword selection tool we select the geographic area we need.

For example, let's choose Moscow and the Moscow region. After that, click “ OK» (click on the picture to enlarge).

We see that we have already begun to display the item “ Display regions» (2) . Please note that there is an additional link on the right " Which regions to choose?» (3) . If you are interested, then by clicking on it, you can read useful information for yourself.

Selection of keywords Yandex Direct

Now we come to the second step. You need to insert key phrases into Yandex Direct. We already know how to select. So you just need to insert the words here (4) from a pre-prepared list.

It is better to insert phrases as a list. If you press the button next to it Pick up» (5) , a new pop-up window will open. In it we can select the necessary keywords for Yandex Direct contextual advertising.

Please note that there is an additional field on the right " Hints» (6) . In it, the Yandex Direct system tells us keywords that for some reason we did not include in our list. We can add them here too.

For the sake of example, I'll add a couple of keywords. If you want to add absolutely all the phrases from this window, you can do this faster using the “ Everyone fits". If the tips don’t suit you, you can click on the “ More» and see additional hint options.

Below you can clear or rearrange the list. If you inserted the words in the form of a sentence, then for greatest convenience I recommend that you organize the list. When we have selected the keywords, you need to click on the “ Calculate«.

Budget forecast Yandex Direct online

Now we have calculated the parameters and some kind of online Yandex Direct budget forecast has appeared. Now I will explain what is here and how. Let's start with the first word " hammer drill". It seems to be inactive for me (slightly darkened) and next to it there is a question mark.

The question arises: " Why does this word stand out so much?"When you hover over the icon, a hint appears: " The phrase is predicted to have a low CTR". Let's look at this low click-through rate on the right.

There is a column " Position". Click on the question mark and see the ad placement in the first place in the search result. If you forgot, you can look at this hint from Yandex Direct.

So, in the column " Position" we see :

  • special accommodation
  • 1st place
  • guaranteed impressions

If you have forgotten what this is, then I recommend clicking on the question mark in the table header to display a tooltip.

A little to the right of these three positions for the keyword are the budget forecast parameters (picture below). First comes the forecast of the average cost per click. That is, Yandex Direct gives us budget forecasting.

Conventional unit- that's 30 rubles. That is, to get it in rubles, we need to multiply each number by 30.

In the keyword " hammer drill» The click-through rate of guaranteed impressions is 0.33. That is, she is the smallest (less than 0.50). That is why ours is darkened and shown in such an inactive style.

If you click on the hint (question mark), then you can see that YAN does not recommend using this keyword. Statistically, such a request will collect very few clicks.

Let's take the following query. For example, " Bosch rotary hammer". It is also darkened, since Yandex Direct does not recommend using such a request in an advertising campaign. Here the click-through rate of the first place and guaranteed impressions is less than 0.50%.

In principle, such a Yandex Direct budget forecast can be called a kind of media plan. After selecting keywords, you will be able to estimate how many clicks and budget you need to count on to get good results from contextual advertising.

Let's now look at how the free Yandex Direct budget calculation works. Now we have all the data. Now you need to get a special table that will collect data on the cost and budget of advertising on the Internet.

Accordingly, you can choose “ " or " select entry position for guaranteed impressions«.

When you select these items, you can see that the budget amount is recalculated at the bottom of the report (8) . If I click on " “, then it will be almost 41,910 rubles per month.

If you click on " select the entry position to the 1st place"will be more than 7,000 rubles. And for guaranteed impressions it will be 3,406 rubles. This will be our Yandex budget forecast for the month.

Below is additional information from YAN. It says that the actual budget may differ and here we simply show Yandex Direct statistics for those campaigns that are already running in the system for these keywords.

Accordingly, with such a report we can do the following. For example, I click on " Select entry position to special accommodation". Then you can either print this report or export it to xls.

Let's export to an Excel spreadsheet and see how everything will look there (click to enlarge).

So let's see. There is a media plan here that contains information:

  • campaign timing and regions
  • suggested phrases with special placement positions
  • impressions per month
  • number of transitions (for each keyword we see the approximate number of clicks)
  • click-through rate forecast
  • average cost per click forecast
  • total budget

Not only that, at the top we can select different positions for all keywords at the same time. This way we can still select our own individual position for each request.

Let's say I want to show up everywhere in guaranteed impressions (click on “select entry position for guaranteed impressions”).

At the same time, I see that at the request “ buy a hammer drill» special accommodation (10) costs less than guaranteed impressions (9) . So I need to select the top item (10) .

Accordingly, this method can be done for other key phrases. You can choose a profitable advertising space for each keyword.

So, we have made a free online budget forecast for Yandex Direct, which predicts the number of clicks and expenses on an advertising campaign for a month by keywords and regions.

This calculation is approximate, but allows you to navigate the cost of advertising campaigns, cost per click, and the like.